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Notes -
The Onion filed an amicus brief a few days ago in a case called Novak v. Parma. It's been making the rounds on social media lately because it's a legitimately funny and well-written document. It may well be among the best briefs I've read in my ten years as a litigator. Attorneys often seem to forget that job one of writing is to produce something readable. Nowhere is this more important than in amici, since judges are not required to read them in the first place.
What's the culture war angle here? Surprisingly (to me, at least), the brief is an unreserved and unapologetic defense of free speech by a respectable mainstream organization. This wouldn't have been so strange a few years ago, but it seems like the mainstream line on free speech has recently shifted from "free speech is important and must be defended" to "free speech is important and must be defended as long as it's not that kind of free speech." The ACLU has famously moved away from its robust defense of free speech, and nearly every publisher and platform has caveated any pro-free-speech views with disclaimers that carve out "bad" free speech like "disinformation" and "speech that causes harm."
But the brief doesn't even allude to caveats, and in some ways can be read to expressly repudiate them. One heading is titled "A Reasonable Reader Does Not Need A Disclaimer To Know That Parody Is Parody" and boldly proclaims "True; not all humor is equally transcendent. But the quality and taste of the parody is irrelevant." Nowhere do words like "harm" or "hate" or "disinformation" appear in the brief. Nowhere does the brief even allude to the popular idea that free speech can be used to "punch down" or "marginalize."
What makes this perhaps even more remarkable to me is the fact that Novak v. Parma isn't primarily about free speech, it's primarily about qualified immunity. It would have been extremely easy to dodge the free speech issue and emphasize a much woker angle, e.g., qualified immunity prevents people of color who have been harmed or killed by police from recovering damages to compensate them and therefore qualified immunity contributes to systemic racism, etc. I suppose this theme would have made for a dour and un-funny document, but given how woke schoolmarmery has tended to destroy humor over the past decade (see, e.g. The Daily Show), it's still a pleasant surprise to see they didn't go this route.
Maybe my optimism is unwarranted, but I'm marking this down as one small data point in favor of the theory that the woke tide is receding. I don't think it's going away completely, but I do think people are getting tired of it and I'm hopeful we'll start seeing a bit less of it in our daily lives.
I'm not sure, I'd lean more towards your optimism being unwarranted. The Onion has fallen far and fast in terms of being an even-handed satire site. The Bablyon Bee and it's solid 6/10 performance should never have been allowed to enter the market at all, much less succeed as much as it has. The only reason it's done so is because the Onion has completely retreated from almost any critique of leftism.
Have you seen Babylon Bee's video satire "Californians move to Texas"? I had to pause the video at several points because I was laughing so hard. It's become a serial now. Here, enjoy it for yourself.
I actually do think the Bee is funnier than The Onion in average. There's a lot of good stuff there and they switch hit plenty, but I do miss bush-era Onion.
At this point, I think a lot of people miss Bush-era anything cultural. Or, at least, I do. (Consider the "Wake up, bro, it's 2006/7/8/9" meme.)
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This is what surprised me about the brief. If a "transgressive" comedian like Dave Chapelle or Matt Stone and Trey Parker had filed this amicus brief I wouldn't have batted an eye. But the Onion has obediently toed the party line for quite some time. And the party line has been hostile to full-throated defenses of free speech. The fact that a politically correct institution is defending free speech with no disclaimers is a positive sign.
I don't want to beat the horse too hard but.... I would stop very short of this being a full-throated defense of free speech. It's extremely close to what The Onion does in that this guy ran a parody account. And he's parodying a police department, an organization many writers at The Onion would doubtless have called to be defunded in 2020.
While Mr. Novak's page was overall pretty neutral, it still had a leftist tinge (though it's been hard to find great screengrabs etc.)
All I'm saying is that leftist institutions are very capable of crying "Free Speech" when it suits them, that's not a different behavior than anything we've seen the past 12 years.
I take your point, but can you think of any examples in the past couple of years of a politically correct organization putting out a statement defending free speech without some kind of caveat like "...but that doesn't mean freedom from consequences" or "...but we also acknowledge that free speech has been used to perpetuate systems of oppression." I can't think of any examples besides this one. I certainly can't think of any other examples that included a statement like "the quality and taste of the parody is irrelevant."
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